Advantages of the digital twin in your manufacturing business

When your company creates digital twins of your products, the environments they operate in and the systems that produce them, you can virtually predict what will happen in the physical world. And when you seamlessly connect information from your digital twins using the digital thread, you learn from your simulations, tests and analysis and so you optimize performance – all before you build physical counterparts.

The advantage of the digital twin and the digital thread is being able to solve common problems, well in advance of manufacturing products, that prevent you from leading your market and your industry. Here are some of the problems digital twins help you solve.

Reduce product defects and production costs. The costs that accrue with product defects can bankrupt companies, regardless of where they stand in the market. It’s important to reduce the risk of potential product defects in your existing products – and eliminate nearly all risk in future products.

The advantage of the digital twin in accomplishing this is that they help you move your validation processes into the virtual world – but still keep you connected to how your products act in the physical world. This virtual-physical connection lets you analyze how a product performs under a number of conditions and make necessary adjustments in the virtual world to ensure that the physical product will perform exactly as planned in the field. It doesn’t matter if you have complex systems and materials – digital twins and a digital thread help you navigate that complexity to make the best possible decisions with confidence.

This confidence in performance also extends to your production processes. The digital twin and digital thread help you validate how your production process will act on the shop floor before anything actually goes into production. By perfecting this performance using your digital twins, and understanding why things are happening using the digital thread, your company can prevent costly downtime to machines and robots on the shop floor. You can even predict when preventative maintenance will be necessary to avoid unnecessary downtime.

Shorten time to market. Getting to market faster than the competition is a problem many companies face, but it can be a problem of the past.

By using digital twins and the digital thread to virtually validate how your product and production processes will behave and perform, your company saves time – and money – in simulation, testing and analysis. You no longer have to rely on only physical; instead, you can include information from their physical performance in your digital twins to maintain a high version of fidelity and reality in the virtual world.

This constant stream of accurate, updated information gives you the intelligence you need to make decisions faster, increase your production speed and optimize your productivity to get to market faster.